Shares in Moneysupermarket.com, Britain’s biggest price comparison website,
have fallen 15pc as the impressive growth of recent years appears to be
slowing down.

The company, which compares savings rates, mortgages and insurance and takes a cut from providers, said today that revenue in July was flat on last year.

This compares to 10pc revenue growth in the first half of the year, 13pc last year and 22pc in 2011.

Moneysupermarket said July’s sales were flat against a “strong” comparative month last year, when it launched its “£1,000 man” advertising campaign, a series of parodies of television shows from the 1980s.

The company said it would launch a new campaign next month, opening the door for a rebound, but provided little guidance on how it expects the rest of the year to pan out, except to say it was “confident in the long term prospects for the group”. Investors were unimpressed at the company’s vague forecasts, and shares have fallen 31.2p to 181p.

“While [Moneysupermarket] remains confident in long term prospects we note no specific comment on this year’s numbers,” said Investec analyst Steve Liechti. “We intend to tweak [forecasts] down given second-half uncertainties.”

As well as revealing that July’s sales were flat, the company said trading had slowed in the second quarter of the year, as rivals invested in new television campaigns and Google tweaked its search engine. Price comparison websites rely on traffic from Google for much of their business, and falling from the top of the search rankings can hit sales. The search engine has also introduced its own price comparison service, piling additional pressure on Moneysupermarket, as well as competitors such as Confused.com and Compare The Market.

Peter Plumb, Moneysupermarket’s chief executive, added that the Government’s Funding for Lending scheme continued to drive interest rates down, meaning fewer people shopping around for savings.

“We’ve had a good first half of 2013,” he said. “The benefits of our increasingly diversified business are evident. We grew our insurance, home services and travel businesses which more than offset lower demand in our money business where savings revenues continue to be impacted by the Government’s Funding for Lending scheme which is reducing what savers earn on their deposits. “

Revenue from comparing financial products such as savings and mortgages was down 13.4pc on last year, while insurance comparison was up 11pc. Insurance, which accounts for most of Moneysupermarket’s sales, has been the service most affected by the changes to Google’s search algorithms.

The Chester-based company said revenues rose 10pc to £112.3m in the first six months of 2013. Profit before tax was up 70pc at £19.8m.

Moneysupermarket, founded in 1993 as an offline mortgage information business by entrepreneur Simon Nixon, opened its website in 1999 and was listed in 2007 – then the biggest initial public offering for an internet firm since Google in 2004.

In June, Mr Nixon, now deputy chairman, sold 18.5pc of his holding in the company for around £200m, leaving him with 29.5pc of the company.